Humans have been using the power of fluids to drive machinery for the past hundreds of years. The earliest evidence of the use of hydro-power to drive wheels appear in a technical treatises Pneumatica and Parasceuastica by a 3rd century BC Greek engineer, Philo of Byzantium. The force exerted by flowing water was utilised to drive water wheels or water turbines which in turn powered mechanical processes such as milling (grinding), rolling, hammering, sawing etc.

In 1648, Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher and writer, discovered that fluids exerted an equal force in every direction. He firmly believed that mankind would one day greatly benefit from this bit of knowledge. In 1738, a Swiss mathematician called Daniel Bernoulli in his publication Hydrodynamica stated that pressure decreases when the flow velocity increases. It was in 1752 that Leonhard Euler expressed Bernoulli’s observation in its mathematical form – the Bernoulli theorem. Then in 1795, an Englishman called Joseph Bramah (assisted by William Armstrong) patented the first hydraulic press. This revolutionised the use of hydraulics in industry. It is the work of these great men that forms the basis of the design of hydraulic systems of today.

Hydro-powered machinery has come a long way since its predecessor, the humble water wheel. Hydraulics has found its way into every industry right from mining to processing to engineering to material handling to construction to shipping to aviation to defence to aerospace and to just about anything. Today’s manufacturing techniques are a lot more demanding and the modern hydraulic machine is a complex amalgamation of hydraulics, electronics, mechanics and M2M communication technology. From exerting brute force of thousands of tonnes to delicate and precise motion control, hydro-power is being applied to achieve all of this.